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PAPER TOWNS

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Contents
PROLOGUE
PART ONE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
PART TWO
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12

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Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29

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PART THREE
The First Hour
Hour Two
Hour Three
Hour Four
Hour Five
Hour Six
Hour Seven
Hour Eight
Hour Nine
Hour Ten
Hour Eleven
Hour Twelve
Hour Thirteen
Hour Fourteen
Hour Fifteen
Hour Sixteen

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Hour Seventeen
Hour Eighteen
Hour Nineteen
Hour Twenty
Hour Twenty-one
Agloe
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

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PROLOGUE
The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never be
struck by lightning, or win a Nobel Prize, or become the dictator of a small
nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or spontaneously
combust. But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them
will probably happen to each of us. I could have seen it rain frogs. I could have
stepped foot on Mars. I could have been eaten by a whale. I could have married
the queen of England or survived months at sea. But my miracle was different.
My miracle was this: out of all the houses in all the subdivisions in all of Florida,
I ended up living next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman.
Our subdivision, Jefferson Park, used to be a navy base. But then the navy didn’t
need it anymore, so it returned the land to the citizens of Orlando, Florida, who
decided to build a massive subdivision, because that’s what Florida does with
land. My parents and Margo’s parents ended up moving next door to one another
just after the first houses were built. Margo and I were two.
Before Jefferson Park was a Pleasantville, and before it was a navy base, it
belonged to an actual Jefferson, this guy Dr. Jefferson Jefferson. Dr. Jefferson
Jefferson has a school named after him in Orlando and also a large charitable
foundation, but the fascinating and unbelievable-but-true thing about Dr.
Jefferson Jefferson is that he was not a doctor of any kind. He was just an orange
juice salesman named Jefferson Jefferson. When he became rich and powerful,
he went to court, made “Jefferson” his middle name, and then changed his first
name to “Dr.” Capital D. Lowercase r. Period.
So Margo and I were nine. Our parents were friends, so we would sometimes
play together, biking past the cul-de-sacced streets to Jefferson Park itself, the
hub of our subdivision’s wheel.
I always got very nervous whenever I heard that Margo was about to show

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up, on account of how she was the most fantastically gorgeous creature that God
had ever created. On the morning in question, she wore white shorts and a pink
T-shirt that featured a green dragon breathing a fire of orange glitter. It is
difficult to explain how awesome I found this T-shirt at the time.
Margo, as always, biked standing up, her arms locked as she leaned above
the handlebars, her purple sneakers a circuitous blur. It was a steam-hot day in
March. The sky was clear, but the air tasted acidic, like it might storm later.
At the time, I fancied myself an inventor, and after we locked up our bikes
and began the short walk across the park to the playground, I told Margo about
an idea I had for an invention called the Ringolator. The Ringolator was a
gigantic cannon that would shoot big, colored rocks into a very low orbit, giving
Earth the same sort of rings that Saturn has. (I still think this would be a fine
idea, but it turns out that building a cannon that can shoot boulders into a low
orbit is fairly complicated.)
I’d been in this park so many times before that it was mapped in my mind, so
we were only a few steps inside when I began to sense that the world was out of
order, even though I couldn’t immediately figure out what was different.
“Quentin,” Margo said quietly, calmly.
She was pointing. And then I realized what was different.
There was a live oak a few feet ahead of us. Thick and gnarled and ancient-
looking. That was not new. The playground on our right. Not new, either. But
now, a guy wearing a gray suit, slumped against the trunk of the oak tree. Not
moving. This was new. He was encircled by blood; a half-dried fountain of it
poured out of his mouth. The mouth open in a way that mouths generally
shouldn’t be. Flies at rest on his pale forehead.
“He’s dead,” Margo said, as if I couldn’t tell.
I took two small steps backward. I remember thinking that if I made any
sudden movements, he might wake up and attack me. Maybe he was a zombie. I
knew zombies weren’t real, but he sure looked like a potential zombie.
As I took those two steps back, Margo took two equally small and quiet steps
forward. “His eyes are open,” she said.
“Wegottagohome,” I said.
“I thought you closed your eyes when you died,” she said.
“Margowegottagohomeandtell.”
She took another step. She was close enough now to reach out and touch his
foot. “What do you think happened to him?” she asked. “Maybe it was drugs or
something.”

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I didn’t want to leave Margo alone with the dead guy who might be an attack
zombie, but I also didn’t care to stand around and chat about the circumstances
of his demise. I gathered my courage and stepped forward to take her hand.
“Margowegotta-gorightnow!”
“Okay, yeah,” she said. We ran to our bikes, my stomach churning with
something that felt exactly like excitement, but wasn’t. We got on our bikes and I
let her go in front of me because I was crying and didn’t want her to see. I could
see blood on the soles of her purple sneakers. His blood. The dead guy blood.
And then we were back home in our separate houses. My parents called 911,
and I heard the sirens in the distance and asked to see the fire trucks, but my
mom said no. Then I took a nap.
Both my parents are therapists, which means that I am really goddamned
well adjusted. So when I woke up, I had a long conversation with my mom about
the cycle of life, and how death is part of life, but not a part of life I needed to be
particularly concerned about at the age of nine, and I felt better. Honestly, I never
worried about it much. Which is saying something, because I can do some
worrying.
Here’s the thing: I found a dead guy. Little, adorable nine-year-old me and
my even littler and more adorable playdate found a guy with blood pouring out
of his mouth, and that blood was on her little, adorable sneakers as we biked
home. It’s all very dramatic and everything, but so what? I didn’t know the guy.
People I don’t know die all the damned time. If I had a nervous breakdown every
time something awful happened in the world, I’d be crazier than a shithouse rat.
That night, I went into my room at nine o’clock to go to bed, because nine
o’clock was my bedtime. My mom tucked me in, told me she loved me, and I
said, “See you tomorrow,” and she said, “See you tomorrow,” and then she
turned out the lights and closed the door almost-all-the-way.
As I turned on my side, I saw Margo Roth Spiegelman standing outside my
window, her face almost pressed against the screen. I got up and opened the
window, but the screen stayed between us, pixelating her.
“I did an investigation,” she said quite seriously. Even up close the screen
broke her face apart, but I could tell that she was holding a little notebook and a
pencil with teeth marks around the eraser. She glanced down at her notes. “Mrs.
Feldman from over on Jefferson Court said his name was Robert Joyner. She
told me he lived on Jefferson Road in one of those condos on top of the grocery

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store, so I went over there and there were a bunch of policemen, and one of them
asked if I worked at the school paper, and I said our school didn’t have a paper,
and he said as long as I wasn’t a journalist he would answer my questions. He
said Robert Joyner was thirty-six years old. A lawyer. They wouldn’t let me in
the apartment, but a lady named Juanita Alvarez lives next door to him, and I got
into her apartment by asking if I could borrow a cup of sugar, and then she said
that Robert Joyner had killed himself with a gun. And then I asked why, and then
she told me that he was getting a divorce and was sad about it.”
She stopped then, and I just looked at her, her face gray and moonlit and split
into a thousand little pieces by the weave of the window screen. Her wide, round
eyes flitted back and forth from her notebook to me. “Lots of people get divorces
and don’t kill themselves,” I said.
“I know,” she said, excitement in her voice. “That’s what I told Juanita
Alvarez. And then she said . . .” Margo flipped the notebook page. “She said that
Mr. Joyner was troubled. And then I asked what that meant, and then she told me
that we should just pray for him and that I needed to take the sugar to my mom,
and I said forget the sugar and left.”
I said nothing again. I just wanted her to keep talking—that small voice tense
with the excitement of almost knowing things, making me feel like something
important was happening to me.
“I think I maybe know why,” she finally said.
“Why?”
“Maybe all the strings inside him broke,” she said.
While I tried to think of something to say in answer to that, I reached forward
and pressed the lock on the screen between us, dislodging it from the window. I
placed the screen on the floor, but she didn’t give me a chance to speak. Before I
could sit back down, she just raised her face up toward me and whispered, “Shut
the window.” So I did. I thought she would leave, but she just stood there,
watching me. I waved at her and smiled, but her eyes seemed fixed on something
behind me, something monstrous that had already drained the blood from her
face, and I felt too afraid to turn around to see. But there was nothing behind me,
of course—except maybe the dead guy.
I stopped waving. My head was level with hers as we stared at each other
from opposite sides of the glass. I don’t remember how it ended—if I went to
bed or she did. In my memory, it doesn’t end. We just stay there, looking at each
other, forever.

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Margo always loved mysteries. And in everything that came afterward, I could
never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became
one.

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